Infinite Gamification
Participating in the development of the infinite game of human flourishing.
Human existence is an ever-developing infinite game made up of many sub-games. James P Carse defined finite and infinite games. “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game.”
We are playing the infinite game of surviving and thriving on Earth. At least for our purposes, it seems never-ending. There are no clear rules, and it is always changing. The game has gotten more complex over the ages. There used to be just a few games that made up the broader game: hunting, gathering, and child-rearing. Then the farming game emerged, and with it, the games of business and government. Then the industrial age and information age brought many more games: more career options (prompt engineer is one of the newest), more hobbies (video games are a huge industry that didn’t exist fifty years ago), more subjects to study and master (machine learning is a prominent current example), and more information in general for people to explore.
All these possibilities mean we have more choices than ever in which games we play. Each person needs to carefully choose which games they play. Choosing the right game means giving yourself a compelling purpose. Think of Elon Musk making humanity a multiplanetary species. You know Elon’s life doesn’t feel dull or meaningless. He’s deeply engaged in a big, risky game that will take unimaginable ingenuity and work.
More concretely, choosing the right game gives you projects. Elon doesn’t wake up in the morning dithering, unsure what to do. He always has an important, meaningful project in front of him because he is playing such a big, challenging game.
Getting engaged in the right game also gives you a set of practices to cultivate. Elon has had to develop his leadership and engineering skills to a world-class level to play his game successfully. This kind of challenging self-development makes the flow state an everyday experience.
Playing a well-chosen, meaningful game ultimately brings an incredible sense of fulfillment, accomplishment, and self-actualization. Imagine how it feels to reopen the final frontier of space or land a rocket on a floating platform or make electric vehicles mainstream.
Finally, playing the right game brings deep relationships with profoundly aligned people. Elon is undertaking superheroic quests with people who he deeply respects. He must have a strong sense of alignment and shared purpose with the people around him. He has such a clear, compelling, and well-known purpose that he is a beacon for the hundred thousand people in the world most aligned with him.
We can’t all be Elon, obviously. He’s a special person. But we all have our own talents, and we can all self-actualize by thoughtfully choosing the right game. Ultimately, we are all participating in developing and improving the infinite game of life.
Simulation games abstract over the less fun parts of activities and enhance the best parts to create an engaging experience. Farm simulators and life simulators drop the boring and unpleasant parts and emphasize the interesting, engaging parts. This is also what technology does. Many types of farming have a more game-like interface now. Instead of the drudgery of harvesting crops by hand, today’s farmers sit high above the ground in an air-conditioned cabin, checking instruments and pushing buttons. A high-tech farmer today is a masterful conductor instead of an often hungry and always struggling peasant. It seems more like a video game than like the back-breaking labor that humans suffered for most of the history of agriculture.
At the same time, video games more and more closely approximate reality. Video game engines are used to create realistic scenes in big-budget movies. So we are converging on game-like simulation and mastery of our environment from two directions.
Life today can already be strikingly game-like. Orange County in California is the home of Disneyland, the iconic “happiest place on Earth.” Disneyland is a small-scale world of joy and play, but Orange County more broadly is a bit like a big theme park. This past winter, you could play at the beach one day, then in the snow the next, each within a half-hour drive on well-maintained roads, all in a clean, safe environment. You can play with software at your engineering job, then surf one weekend and snowboard the next. You can fly a few hours to a wide selection of tropical paradises, from Cancun to Maui. It’s really pretty great when you think about the dreary existence 90% of us would have had five hundred years ago as poor peasants who might never travel further than a day’s walk.
We live in the paradise our ancestors could only imagine because they diligently developed the game. They transcended farming so we could transcend the assembly line and now paper-pushing. All we have to do is participate to the best of our abilities in the meta-game: making existence a more fun, joyful, fulfilling, and flow-inducing game. Playing the game is fun and engaging in itself, but it is deeply meaningful because it has the ultimate purpose of making the game better for those who come after us.
Further reading:
This is inspired by Packy McCormick’s great essays The Great Online Game and The AppetiZIRP. McCormick is a leader in developing the vision of an abundant, technology-enhanced future.